Eyeliner
by Chokopoppo
Summary: Generally, I'm known for my keen eye and my acute knowledge of universal human culture. There are few others, even among humans themselves, who so completely understand the workings of their past, present, and inevitably future, as I do. Few things are beyond my scope of great knowledge. This, apparently, was one of those things. (Fixed code.)


He bent over the small reflective pool of water attentively. I eyed him with a bit less of his ambitious hope as he produced a small tube of khol from somewhere in the recesses of his blanket. "You're going to jam your eye out," I mentioned, in a weary, unconcerned sort of way, flapping a hairless tail aimlessly to show how little I cared. Just in case he looked. Which he didn't. "Maybe you should wait until you can actually keep your hands steady. When you've had more than three hours of sleep in the past three days, for instance. Or after you've gotten good and drunk. Or never."

Ptolemy just laughed and tugged the blanket up closer around his shoulders. The rainy season had begun, and the skies were often so dark in the day that it made it impossible to tell whether the sun was up or not. I, personally, had hoped this prevalent night would get the kid to go a little easier on himself, get a little more kip in, but no such luck. He argued, often, that he worked better at night, as though this was a justification for getting all his rest in the form of catnaps, and the occasional blink. "Stop _worrying_ so much," he said, popping the cap off and focusing intently on the water, "I've done this every day since I was six. I know what I'm doing."

"I know what you're doing too," I grumbled, "playing with a sharp stick near your eye when you can't even hold a quill straight enough to write your name. For all my power and wisdom, I can't actually _fix_ an eye. I find that particular task beyond me. And I'm not _worrying_ about you, stop trying to think I care," I added, shuffling around and trying to get comfortable on Ptolemy's cot again. The Egyptians liked their beds hard, cold, and low to the ground. For all the things they had gotten right, there was a general consensus that they had flubbed this. The heavy application of beautifully embroidered pillows did nothing to ease the feeling of lying on a sacrificial slab, ready to have your heart torn out and rendered unto the sun. Or maybe that was just me.

Chilly gusts of wind blustered through the windows occasionally, making him breathe out heavily like he sometimes did as though it would keep him warm. Very rarely did the desert plains grow cold, but when they did, it was a startling chill and a startling darkness. I half wondered how the poor kid was getting along as I curled into a particularly tight ball of cat. Given the way he had clung to me for warmth in the night, not well – normally, I was assumed as a passive presence when he slept, but apparently, the cold made fools of both of us.

Something small clattered to the ground. "Ow."

"What? What did you do?" The cat sprang to its feet (paws. Whatever.), eyes darting, legs already moving towards him. He covered an eye with his hand, blinked down at me with the undecorated one.

"Oh, I just. My hand jerked, so I hit myself in the eyebrow," he said, lifting the palm away from his face to show me. Sure enough, halfway across the eye, the line of khol had jumped upward and struck against the darker skin above. We stared at each other. He blinked. "No, you're not worried about me at _all,_ are you."

I scowled (well, as much as a cat can scowl. Their faces are generally pretty scowly in the best of moods, so it wasn't as much of a change as I'd hoped for). "I'm only worried about the inevitable eye-rending tragedy that inevitably follows me allowing you to do this yourself."

"You said 'inevitable' twice."

"Because it's doubly inevitable, with your hand tremors and now the shivering," I snapped, less because I was trying to make a point and more because the way he smiled when he'd caught me out on something was really irritating. "If you're really going to _insist_ on wearing it, at least let me do it for you, before you really _do_ jam something out."

"I really think I'll be fine," he began in that fluty tone of voice. I set my front two paws onto his bony knee and pressed my claws insistently into his skin.

" _I_ don't. And I'm older, so I know best."

He stared down at me skeptically. I put on the sternest, most academic and formal face a cat could really make. Chances were, he would succumb to my suavity and stop being an idiot. It usually worked.

"I'm sorry," he said at last, "it's just really hard to take you seriously when you're pulling a face like that."

"I look suave and aloof!"

"You look like you have indigestion," he replied, a smile creeping into his voice. "I guess if _that's_ how it makes you feel, I can't really stop you." He pressed his fingers against his mouth, as though that would hide the grin slowly spreading across his face.

I scowled again, and shifted into the slightly more convenient form of a boy about his age. "Suave and aloof," I said again, more for effect than anything, "one day, you'll learn the meaning of those words, and realize that my existence perfectly embodies both virtues. Constantly," I added, flipping long, dark hair dramatically behind my shoulder.

"You mean like that time you punted the head of the statue of Ra across the river and fell in?"

"Bets don't count."

"Or that time you got into a fist fight with a foliot over an imp, and while you were bickering it got away and you had to chase it through the river mud and came back to me smelling so rank a number of the women in the palace fainted?"

"That was…"

"Or that time, just now, when-"

"When I said all the time," I interrupted, "I really meant all the time in personal grace and tact when not busy with a particularly humiliating or simple order far below my stature. Now shut up." I brandished the khol stick at him menacingly, which didn't stop him from covering his mouth with a palm and snorting gracelessly. And right after chiding me for my only occasional and easily forgotten mishaps, too! I ask you. Some people are just completely thankless.

Keep in mind, of course, that I didn't actually want to deal with the khol. It was, essentially, lead paste – heavy, dark, and so earthy I could feel the coldness pouring out and into the air around it. Even Ptolemy seemed to notice, once he stopped his hideous cackling, eyeing the stick with a certain amount of wariness he hadn't held previously.

"Rhekyt, I hate to insinuate your knowledge is anything less than complete and fantastical, but have you ever actually done this before?"

Oh. Or it could be that.

I waved the stick around carelessly in one hand. "I've seen you, and countless others, do it over and over again. I learn from more than just experience! You humans, with your single-track mind and compressed level of comprehension, have no reason to doubt me. I am a being of wind and fire! For three thousand years, I have garnered more knowledge than you could even begin to fathom."

He blinked at me in that placid sort of way. "So you haven't."

"Well, um…" in any other circumstance, I would have begun rattling off past experiences and insisted I knew what I was doing, but I didn't like lying to the kid, and I really hadn't. It was one of those things that just never came up. "How hard can it be?" I improvised, shrugging casually and accepting the tube from his hand.

He sighed, loosened his shoulders and sat back. "At least I'm not going out today."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"You're welcome," he said, in the cheeriest voice imaginable. I would've made a snide comment, but he had sort of stopped that in its tracks – he always did. Still, it was a good response, all things considered. I decided to use it sometime, if it ever came up. I pressed a palm under his jaw to steady his face, and his eyes fluttered shut at the touch.

Generally, I'm known for my keen eye and my acute knowledge of universal human culture. There are few others, even among humans themselves, who so completely understand the workings of their past, present, and inevitably future, as I do. Few things are beyond my scope of great knowledge. This, apparently, was one of those things. In my defense, I have rarely been praised for the steadiness of my hand, and I'd sort of forgotten the way human eyes still flickered when they were closed. To be fair, I don't generally touch humans' eyelids except when specifically ordered to, and even then, they're usually dead. Ptolemy's, much like the rest of his skin, were soft, and felt thin, like they could be easily punctured. This did nothing to ease my discomfort.

Still, how hard could it be? I touched the khol to his skin, and with supreme effort, made an attempt at a straight line.

Um. Okay. Right.

Under my fingers, his mouth twitched in the ghost of laughter. I scowled. "Stop looking, you're putting me off."

"My eyes are _closed,_ Rhekyt."

"Well, keep them that way," I snapped, and returned to my…the line. Well, I could fix that, all things considered. It had just sort of gone the wrong way. I drew another line below the first, which had decided to skid off the beaten path to freedom. Technically, the second line went better, but given that the first had ended up closer to his eyebrow than eyelid, that really wasn't saying much. But it was fine. I could still get this together, even if I _did_ have to resist the urge to lick my thumb and scrub the paste off his skin again. It would burn to do so, most likely.

Throughout the rest of the process, I avoided dealing out curses foul enough to spoil milk only due to the occasional giggle from Ptolemy, or the even more occasional 'soothing' hand-pat. Both of these highlighted how poorly I was doing, which calls my following aversion to letting out the oldest and rawest vows and spittle I had into question.

The second eye I did arguably better on, presumably due to warming up in the mass darkness of the first (which I had mentally begun to refer to as 'the abyss', keeping its uncanny new blackness in mind), but I got the feeling I might be running out of khol once I got near to the end. If the exercise had taught me nothing else – and I bit back another curse as I felt his fingertips press lightly to the back of the palm not deeply entrenched in the foulest work conjured by man – it was an insane and regrettable admiration for my master. The lines he drew for himself were so straight, and he managed it every day. There was no way around it. We had both discovered, at about the same time, that there was something he was better at than I was.

When, at last, I had rid myself of the awful task my own stupidity had set upon me, as well as sealed the tube of khol and thrown it bodily at a wall and out of sight, I looked on my own work. It wasn't the _worst_ job I'd done (look, it's hard to beat out Jericho, alright?), but it certainly wasn't the sort of thing I'd brag about. The boy's eyes were still dutifully closed, but he was grinning in a terribly unsettling way. It wasn't disturbing or anything, it was more that he was still smiling at all. Apparently, the ordeal hadn't worn on him as hard as it had on me.

"Can I look now?"

I bit my lip. "Alright, in my defense-"

"Whaaat did you do?"

"In my defense," I said over him, keeping my face as straight as possible, "working with lead is harder for me than it is for you, and furthermore, I have never seen anyone do that for anyone _else_ , so it's not as if I could _actually_ learn from experience, here-"

"I'm hearing backpedaling, Rhekyt," He said, opening his eyes for the first time. It actually didn't look as bad with his eyes open – almost decorative, like an inverted burst of light. As though I could create anything wholly terrible. "Where's that water bowl, again?"

Perhaps the form of a cat would have more adequately served my task of looking put off and mildly irritated as Ptolemy held his hands over his mouth to stop giggles from trailing out, but it somehow seemed like too much effort, and I remained as the young boy, arms and legs crossed, carefully not looking at him. Just in case he looked my direction. Which, in fact, he did. Several times. I could tell, less because of the incredible powers of sense us djinn have and more because he made this weird little snorting noise every time he did. It was actually a bit concerning. I would ask him if he was alright, but I was still busy looking disdainful and attractive. Also, I was finding that silence really didn't suit me. "The water bowl thing is really inconvenient, though," I said conversationally, "why don't you use your enormous brain to invent something a little easier to use? And stop snorting like that, you'll choke."

He smiled and shook his head. "I err to your judgment," he said, and for a moment, sunlight I knew couldn't be there glinted on his eye, and it was like staring into the darkness of the waters on the far edges of the world at the first break of day, hinting at an endless depth inconceivable to man or beast. A wave on the rocks, the rain drenching the sand that reached forever onward into the dusk. He was part of a world made of too much water, in it and of it and not.

"What are you staring at? Do I have something on my face? Oh, wait."

"I was admiring my handiwork," I replied, pulling myself out of a reverie suddenly enough to make myself dizzy.

He took my hand – it was sort of a normal response mechanism for him by now – and smiled more gently than before. "I think it has the potential to look good. Maybe on someone else. And when done with a straighter hand."

"My hand was _incredibly_ straight."

"Rhekyt, there is a line near my _eyebrow."_

There was a moment of silence as we stared each other down, as though each daring the other to break a smile first. Probably sensing he was losing, he tipped his head down and raised the back of my hand to his lips.

There was some enormity in the gesture that neither of us really understood, but which exhausted us both. Actually, it exhausted me. Ptolemy was probably just exhausted. Whatever it was, he rested his head on my shoulder in the silence that followed, his breath growing even.

I ran fingers over the palm of his hand and waited, endlessly, for the sun to rise.


End file.
